Thread: Speed Up Your Bandwidth By 20% Windows uses 20% of your bandwidth

Windows uses 20% of your bandwidth Here's how to Get it back

A nice little tweak for XP. Microsoft reserve 20% of your available bandwidth for their own purposes (suspect for updates and interrogating your machine etc..)

Here's how to get it back:

Click Start-->Run-->type "gpedit.msc" without the "

This opens the group policy editor. Then go to:


Local Computer Policy-->Computer Configuration-->Administrative Templates-->Network-->QOS Packet Scheduler-->Limit Reservable Bandwidth




Double click on Limit Reservable bandwidth. It will say it is not configured, but the truth is under the 'Explain' tab :

"By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this setting to override the default."

So the trick is to ENABLE reservable bandwidth, then set it to ZERO.

This will allow the system to reserve nothing, rather than the default 20%.

I have tested on XP Pro, and 2000
other o/s not tested.

This is pretty obviously a myth. If you actually read "By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this setting to override the default", it's saying that the system is limited to 20% of the total bandwidth, not that it's reserved for this purpose.

See Debunking Common Windows Performance Tweaking Myths for confirmation.

The same settings can be apllied in win7 aswell, although as far as I could tell it had no effect, and as user Coal linked the disabling of the bandwith limit can be dangerous to some applications.

very important tutorial.. i always wonder where does some of my bandwidth goes...i noticed it in windows task manager.. thank you for this...

Originally Posted by Vicar

very important tutorial.. i always wonder where does some of my bandwidth goes...i noticed it in windows task manager.. thank you for this...

See my post. This doesn't free up any bandwidth.

Originally Posted by Coal

This is pretty obviously a myth. If you actually read "By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this setting to override the default", it's saying that the system is limited to 20% of the total bandwidth, not that it's reserved for this purpose.

See Debunking Common Windows Performance Tweaking Myths for confirmation.

true you! i just read your post. there is a lot of good tips to free up ram and increase the speed, clean the registry etc. thank you coal..